HORSLEY, Sir VICTOR ALEXANDER HADEN (1857–1916), physiologist and surgeon, was born in Kensington 14 April 1857. His father was John Callcott Horsley, R.A. [q.v.]; his mother was a sister of Sir Francis Seymour Haden [q.v.]. He was the second son in a family of seven children. His childhood was spent in his father's country house at Cranbrook, Kent, and he became a day-boy at Cranbrook grammar school. In 1874 he matriculated at the university of London; and in his student years at University College Hospital he was already beginning studies of his own in physiology and bacteriology. In November 1880 he qualified for practice. He was house-surgeon to John Marshall [q.v.], and surgical-registrar at University College Hospital. It was at this time that he made a long series of observations on the action of anaesthetics on his own brain. From 1884 to 1890 he was professor-superintendent to the Brown Institution (University of London), in those days a place of great importance, not only as a veterinary hospital, but as the chief centre in London of advanced research in pathology and physiology. It was crippled by lack of funds, but it did admirable work. At the Brown Institution Horsley followed three main lines of study: (1) the action of the thyroid gland, (2) the protective treatment against rabies, (3) the localization of function in the brain.
(1) In 1873 Sir William Withey Gull [q.v.] had published the first description of myxoedema, and thereafter, William Miller Ord [q.v.] and others studied the disease. By 1883 myxoedema and cretinism were coming to be regarded as a result of the absence or inefficiency of thyroid tissue. In 1883 the Clinical Society appointed a committee to investigate the whole subject. Horsley was a member, and to him was entrusted the experimental work. It is important to note that his first experiments (removal of the thyroid) were made on monkeys. He proved beyond all dispute the action of the thyroid, and made certain what had only been guessed. The committee's report, published in 1898, gives a very good summary of myxoedema, but there is not a word of hope about curing the disease. Finally, in 1890, Horsley advised treatment by transplantation of a sheep's thyroid under the patient's skin, as Schiff had suggested. Later, came the work of George Murray and others on the administration of thyroid extract. Horsley's work does not stand absolutely alone; but it was he who founded in this country the modern study of the thyroid gland, and gave us the rational treatment of myxoedema and sporadic cretinism.
(2) The date of Pasteur's first use of the preventive treatment against rabies is July 1885. In 1886 the Local Government Board appointed a commission to study and report on the treatment. Horsley was secretary of this commission. He and (Sir) John Burdon Sanderson [q.v.], (Sir) Thomas Lauder Brunton [q.v.], and Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe [q.v.] went to Paris, where Horsley learned the whole method and collected many notes. It is literally true that Horsley, at the Brown Institution, was the only thorough student of rabies, and the only representative and interpreter of Pasteur's method in this country. He studied the outbreak of rabies among the deer in Richmond Park in 1886–1887, when no less than 264 deer died. In 1888 he examined and exposed the claims of a quack cure for rabies, the ‘Bouisson bath treatment’. He was chairman of the society for the prevention of hydrophobia, and together with other members of the commission rendered great services to the government over the enforcement of the order for the muzzling of dogs (1897).
(3) In 1884 Horsley began his chief work in physiology, his investigations of the localization of function in the brain and spinal cord. He was associated in this work with (Sir) E. A. Sharpey Schafer, Charles Edward Beevor [q.v.], (Sir) Felix Semon [q.v.], and his brother in law, Francis Gotch. He came to the work at the time of the high tide of interest in the physiology and pathology of the brain; and his contributions to the literature of the subject are numerous and very important.
In 1885 Horsley became assistant surgeon at University College Hospital. In 1886, at the very height of his experimental studies, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society and professor of pathology at University College. That year, also, he was appointed surgeon to the National Hospital for the Paralysed and Epileptic, Queen Square, a post which brought him the leadership in a great field of surgery. Fifty years ago the rules for surgical interference with the brain were those which Ambroise Paré had followed in the sixteenth century. Trephining is not cerebral surgery: it is skull surgery. The recorded cases of real modern cerebral surgery, on the principles of localization of function, were not more than a dozen or so, when
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